Surviving SEO in a Voice Search World

You wouldn’t want your annual profits cut by 20 percent, would you? Just like you wouldn’t overlook one out of five of your customers.

By the latest stats, 20 percent of people searching on mobile are doing it with voice search. And we expect that number to grow significantly as more and more people adapt to voice search and voice assistants.

Just before that, RankBrain — Google’s machine learning artificial intelligence system — hit the scene. RankBrain makes interpreting queries (including voice searches) and matching them to the best search results easier for the Google search engine.

Voice Search Beyond the Mobile Device

The fact that over 40 percent of voice searches happen at home, versus around 20 percent happening on the go, presents a new level of complexity when we’re thinking about how our brands can become a part of a person’s daily search habits.

What we don’t know yet is the future of how voice assistants like Google Home will identify and serve up results.

In many cases, devices like Google Home have to make complex decisions for you about which answer or result to serve up. This is unlike the traditional way of personally choosing among a set of blue links on a page, and voice search optimizations must be accounted for.

Voice search adds further complexity to local search results, in particular. For example, someone who has a broken water pipe might simply tell their Google Home device: “My plumbing is broken,” versus a more traditional voice search like “show me plumbers in my local area” or “who are the best plumbers in my area?”

As search behavior changes, Google has more work to do to find the best answers, and we as digital marketers have more work to do to understand how to become a part of those results.

How to Prepare Your SEO Strategy for Voice Search

We do, however, understand some things about voice search to date, and how it can impact your SEO strategy.

Let’s look closer at what you need to know to survive SEO as voice search becomes more and more the norm.

Know Your Audience

As part of your voice search keyword research strategy, your company needs to be aware of how someone would look for your product or service if they were using a voice search.

Remember, voice searches are more conversational and tend to center around questions instead of the two- or three-word queries that many people type.

But they can also be declarative statements, like the one I used in the plumbing example earlier.

As part of your research, create a list of voice searches you believe users would use. Brainstorm with your team. Peruse social media. Look at forums. Do whatever you need to do to come up with a good starting list for research.

Know Your Results

We recommend in our SEO training class that people start querying their brand, products and services using voice search to find out if they show up and how.

Most companies haven’t taken the time to figure out how to do a search for their products or services on a device using voice search. But, with your newfound keyword research, you can start.

Once you perform that real-time voice query research, if you find your website isn’t showing up, your web pages and their content need some work.

It’s likely that your website pages aren’t doing a good job of answering a where, when, why, what or how-type question.

Know Your Competition

As part of your SEO strategy, you want to find out who is, in fact, showing up for those voice search queries if not you — or who is ranking above you.

Performing page-by-page analyses of the top 10 rankings, for example, for a voice search important to your business can help you better understand the logistics of the content on those top-ranking pages.

Apply Voice Search Keyword Strategy and Website Optimization

The approach to optimizing web pages is the same — meaning you want to ensure you’re following SEO best practices.

But you may choose to tweak your content.

You might decide to include the same target keywords in your meta information and heading tags, but tweak the content to be in the form of a question posed by someone using voice search.

This keyword modification tactic could be applied page-wide where it makes sense and feels natural. You might also use the data you gleaned from your voice search keyword research plus the competitive research I mentioned to identify content on your site that’s missing.

Where could you better answer many of the questions your target audience has?

While it’s ultimately Google’s job to best match a search query to a web page, it’s also our jobs as website publishers to do as much as we can to help make that match.

So, many of the SEO practices we’re used to still apply to help make your pages relevant.

Right now, it’s safe to say we’re in an experimental phase, where we’re learning how voice search works across devices, how search results surface and how to be a part of it all. And there’s still much work to do.

As brands, we need to figure out how to become a seamless part of our audience’s search habits across technology and devices. Imagine the competitive advantage you would have in being a leader in the “new” search.

But we also need to continue to implement the SEO best practices that help search engines understand our website and its content. Only now, we have more contexts than ever to consider.

What do you think? Do you think a brand can be the last to implement a voice search strategy? Can you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

About the Author

Bruce Clay is founder and president of Bruce Clay, Inc., a global digital marketing firm providing search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media marketing, SEO-friendly web architecture, and SEO tools and education. Connect with him on LinkedIn and other social networks from Bruce's author page.

27 responses to “Surviving SEO in a Voice Search World”

Although it may feel intimidating at first, and it will take some adjustments and getting use too, surviving and thriving as a digital marketing company in the age of voice search is just another step will have to take in this technological era. We can do it!

I wasn’t aware that voice search was growing at such a rapid pace – I guess this is something we’ll have to start optimizing for. Our Durban website design agency has been able to ride out the shifts in the market but technology has really been speeding up the rate at which these shifts occur.

This new way to deal with the conventional web pursuit can have a colossal impact over the measure of times a website comes up in web search tool comes about, and the volume of hunt activity coordinated towards it.

I can’t understand any of the commenters who are saying that they don’t use voice search and neither do any of their friends or family members. I have two teenage sons and they almost exclusively search by voice. I have learned to do it much myself, as has my mother who is 67 years old! It is something you must definitely pay attention to as an SEO provider.

It’s really convenient to use voice search nowadays but some people are really used to it since voice recognition is not good on some smartphones. With the rise of better smartphones every one and a half years, voice search will become and trend.

Adrian: As far as the tech goes, Google Now can already handle voice queries in dozens of languages (see list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Voice_Search#Supported_languages). Or were you referring more to the SEO’s job being more difficult in other languages?

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think voice search will have took much of an impact on many service type businesses, especially those in the home improvement industry. Users still want to see reviews and see examples of past work to make determinations. But I do think optimizing for voice will have a major impact in other areas.

Google is evolving every year and so the entire world of SEO. With the change of technology, the demand of voice search is high and in coming days this will drive the SEO. Thanks for sharing this awesome update.

Yes, Bruce. I totally agree with you but shocked by the data you provided that 43 percent of people use voice search in their home in America. If so, we must concentrate on voice search optimisation. (“,)
Thanks for well crafted and informative post.
Kindly
Prajwol

Although some of those numbers can seem intimidating to Internet marketing companies, it’s all about adjusting to the changes and staying with the times. Just as we adapted to searching for services electronically as opposed to in the Yellow Pages, so too will we be able to adjust to optimizing websites for voice searches in conjunction with typed searches.

It will be a combination of both however I do agree that businesses should prepare for the shift and be ready.

I personally have Google Home and I still use good old search for a lot of my stuff. But when I am driving I don’t mind asking a question and get quick answer.

To me voice search is more of a “preview/trailer” of the whole movie. If I ask Google to tell me more about planet Mercuy it gives a short description which is great however it is not enough and this is where you get on your device and do further reading.

This changes unless Google decides to give the whole answer and read 3000+ words article about Mercury while you are driving.

At that stage I would be worried because basically Google is stealing all my content and making money out of my work and I am getting nothing.

So while I am ready for the shift as long as we can add valuable information the users will probably want to learn more which can lead them to visit our website or perform further research on Google.

At the same time I think certain queries will be gone from typed to voice. For instance, how old is brad pitt or when is [insert movie name] plays in cinema near me.

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